He’s exceeded my low expectations Joe Biden was not my first pick for president, but that’s how it goes. Remember: This is politics. If you want a soul mate, try Match dot com. Even then, ever had an argument with your spouse and stayed married? There you go. President Biden has chalked up quite a record going into this November. I hate flying. Hate it. If a desination is within 600 miles or so, I drive. It’s not worth the headache and expense to fly. By the time I drive to the airport (which, depending on the destination, could take 1-1/2 to 2 hours) with enough lead time to park, get cleared through security, and to the gate with time to spare, I’m already partway there if I just drove. The last time I got on a plane, I missed a 1 p.m. connection because of a weather delay, waited hours for the next flight out, then sat on the tarmac for another hour in the late afternoon during another weather delay. By the time I got to my hotel after 11 p.m. it was like 12+ hours from the time I left the house. I could have driven (with gas/food stops) in 10-1/2. For less. Joe Biden’s administration means to address that customer-unfriendly experience.
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Donald Trump held a little rally at a construction site in New York before his trial commenced on Thursday morning. He glad-handed the workers and passed out some pamphlets saying that he would end Biden’s electric vehicle mandate. They all seemed to like him but then they would: Fox News reported that the attendees were solicited and vetted by the campaign. In fact, one of the “workers” interviewed at the event was actually a notorious former staffer of George Santos: In other words, it was just another example of Trump fake news, which has been revealed in his hush money trial as a specialty of his going back decades. Trump was very upset that he had to attend that proceeding since his Supreme Court immunity case was being argued before the Supreme Court yesterday and he had wanted to attend. Unfortunately he’s a criminal defendant and doesn’t get the privilege of making his own schedule of court appearances around the country as he’s used to doing. Instead, he had to face more testimony from his old friend, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker who took the stand for the second day.
As you may or may not know, Trump hates animals, especially dogs. S. Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is so desperate to be his VP pick that she is currying favor with him by telling the tale of how she hated her pet dog and shot her. I’m not kidding. “Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant. What unfolds over the next few pages shows how that effort went very wrong indeed – and, remarkably, how Cricket was not the only domestic animal Noem chose to kill one day in hunting season. Noem’s book – No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward – will be published in the US next month. The Guardian obtained a copy. Like other aspirants to be Trump’s second vice-president who have ventured into print, Noem offers readers a mixture of autobiography, policy prescriptions and political invective aimed at Democrats and other enemies, all of it raw material for speeches on the campaign stump.
The Trumpers have already “won” the immunity case: Donald Trump‘s inner circle doesn’t expect the Supreme Court to go along with his extreme arguments about executive power in the immunity case before the justices. But what the high court does now is almost beside the point: Trump already won. Three people with direct knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone that many of the former president’s lawyers and political advisers have already accepted that the justices will likely rule against him, and reject his claims to expansive presidential immunity in perpetuity. Bringing the case before the court — after a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., shut down their arguments on executive power — was a delaying tactic designed to push Trump’s criminal election subversion trial past Election Day this fall. The strategy paid off so much more than MAGAworld anticipated. “We already pulled off the heist,” says a source close to Trump, noting it doesn’t matter to them what the Supreme Court decides now.
Are armbands coming? Two things, both from The Atlantic. If you are one of those people who cannot look at Stephen Miller without seeing him in a black uniform with a red armband, consider, he’ll have company if things ever come to that. Adam Serwer on Wednesday pointedly called out wannabe goose-steppers in the U.S. Senate, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, both Republicans, of course. “Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint,” Serwer begins: On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X, “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.” He later deleted the post and reworded it so that it did not sound quite so explicitly like a demand for aspiring vigilantes to lynch protesters.
Still more charges for Trump confederates Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) is still investigating the 2020 fake electors scheme “to keep Unindicted Coconspirator 1 in office.” But as of Wednesday, she’s charged 18 people associated with the plot with felony counts of conspiracy, fraud and forgery. The indictment caps off a year-long investigation into the fraudulent slate of Donald Trump electors sent to Congress after Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes. Similar schemes played out in Michigan, Georgia and Nevada. Redacted in the indictment are seven names of individuals living outside Arizona. The Washington Post, however, identifies them as some of Trump’s closest allies and advisers: Those indicted include former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman and Christina Bobb, top campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn and former campaign aide Mike Roman. They are accused of allegedly aiding an unsuccessful strategy to award the state’s electoral votes to Trump instead of Biden after the 2020 election.
The archaic, undemocratic electoral college stakes are very high Josh Marshall notes that 538 has finally put up their polling average and then takes a look at the state of the electoral college strategy: The headline here is Trump and Biden tied at the national level and Trump holding what they call a “tenuous” lead in the swing states. But the breakdown of their averages shows something more specific. The two candidates also basically tied in the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The precise averages are actually Trump +1.1 (Michigan), Biden +.1 (Wisconsin) and Trump +0.9 (Pennsylvania). But those datasets are still weighted toward GOP-leaning polls at the moment. In any case, those are basically ties and I’m fairly confident Biden wins those. It’s the Southern-tier states of Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Arizona which each have Trump leads of around 5 points, give or take. Here’s the key. If Biden holds the Blue Wall states and wins that single electoral vote in Nebraska he gets to 270 votes. Literally the absolute minimum to win. That’s if he loses Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada. So 270 to 268.
He actually doubled down on his stupidity.
This conversation was posted on January 17th 2020,It remains one of the best discussions I’ve come across on this subject: After a harrowing discussion about humanity’s undeniable march towards a dystopian future, world-renowned thinker Noam Chomsky and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer move on to other pressing topics related to current events. Beginning with the issue that inspired the two-part interview, Scheer explains that an episode of his podcast “Scheer Intelligence” which featured Susie Linfield discussing her book “The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky” led to an ongoing exchange with Chomsky.
He’s very desperate right now Trump issued that call for his cult to protest at the courthouse last night. It’s not surprising. They haven’t shown up to protest for him on the courthouse steps or anywhere else. This was from day 1. There weren’t any more today after he made that call. So he lied: He’s only been able to get a ragtag handful of weirdos to show up at the courthouse and it’s freaking him out. His rallies aren’t drawing like they used to but it’s early in the campaign. The people who come to them at the moment are hard core cultists who love the ritual the same way Grateful dead fans used to follow them all over the world. I know people who follow Bruce Springsteen the same way. But there are no crowds coming to his trial and I would guess it’s because the rallies are a very specific kind of fun get together for the true believers. This isn’t that.